RE: [GD-General] Eiffel

[Brian H. <bri...@py...>]

> Near the end of your email, I think you made the right 
> distinction between debugging STL (which I'm arguing is a 
> distraction at best)

More generally, debugging a third party set of reusable code should be a
distraction at best.

> So - given that I was talking about debugging STL in that bit 
> you excerpted - what's the contradiction?

It seemed to me that the bulk of your e-mail was raging against the
notion of "debugging STL", I was merely stating that no one said as much
(i.e. my complaints were on the "debuggability of programs that use
STL").

> lessons are deeply ingrained.  So since I never free things 
> twice any longer, does that mean free() is badly designed?

Yes, in fact, it does.  The CRTL is not what I consider an example of
good library design.  A library that allows, for lack of a better
phrase, "intuitive but incorrect usage", is probably poorly implemented
(maybe not designed, but once again, I'm not against STL's design -- I
haven't used it enough to really judge -- but I am against the
implementations).

> that's your baby.  But you can't argue that STL is badly 
> designed because Plauger's implementation does no input 
> validation or debug checking.  You might be able to argue it 
> from other standpoints, but not from that one.

Which is good, because I don't think that's what I said =)

> p.s. sorry if I got anyone's hopes up too high, the STLPort 
> iterators do NOT actually use Mr. T voices.

Well crap, I guess I'm cancelling that download now.

Brian